Exclusive Interview: Massimo Piombo, Welcome to America

Massimo Piombo is owner, philosopher, and inventor of the Piombo collection that makes its US debut tonight at New York's Barneys. Just don't call him a designer. Piombo is, in fact, the creative driving force behind a line of men's clothing that typifies the current mood toward dandy, eclectic dishevelment, one in which a man's wardrobe is collected magpie-style and where the provenance of things, and their meaning (not to put too fine a point on it), goes far deeper than fashion.

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"I don't like 'luxury'" he explains, lowering his voice a little. "Or, at least, what people call luxury these days. To me, it's kind of... vulgar? Instead, I love the way a certain kind of man, confident and elegant, puts things together: old, and new, and rich, and rough, and formal, and casual. It's not an Italian thing. Piombo, for me, is a collection without a passport. It's from everywhere."

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Drawing inspirations from items as disparate as Afghan rugs, French wallpaper, Indian shawls, Scottish tweed, and American denim, Piombo's creative process results more from an ongoing peripatetic globetrot than the traditional — and intensely local — Italian approach to tasteful dressing. The long thread of Piombo's twenty-year history began with that sort of wandering, in 1988, to Scotland. Then, he was in search of the venerable Scottish mills that had once woven the tweed used in a jacket of his grandfather's, and therefore packed, for young Massimo, with meaningful emotional associations.

"At first, [the old Scottish mills] didn't want to know when I went to them — they were more interested in making lighter commercial cloths that were kind of boring. But eventually they fished out their old archive books and they were amazing." Much of the old ways of weaving (which still, miraculously, hang by a thread) were done by single weavers working in their own crofts. This, for Massimo, was — and remains — a virtue.

"Like then, what we do is all artisanal," he continues. "Not just to be precious, you understand, but because a hand-loomed cloth, like a proper Harris tweed, has tiny irregularities, imperfections if you like, that give it more personality." Hand-loomed cloth also tends to be slightly looser in the weave than cloths woven on high-speed automated looms. This adds a little give to the cloths, making the trim shapes of Piombo's clothing that much more comfortable. "When we started, fashion was all about lightweight cloths and oversized, relaxed tailoring," he says. "But I wanted to do super elegant tailoring with narrow sleeves and high armholes that fit close to the chest — that's what is considered elegant where I come from. And I wanted to do it in those thick old cloths from the archives of those mills."

It has taken a while for fashion to embrace and understand Piombo. But now, as men's fashion is on the hunt for clothes with built-in history and a certain Bohemian elegance, this is certainly his moment.